The sky is not falling, but it is only ever thus as long as everyone pops a headache pill and gets to work.

Or, to put it another way, both Jason Baker and Jeff Earle were right the other night, at the same time.

During Tuesday’s first look at the 2018 budget, city corporate services director David Dick presented yet another description of the Sisyphean task that is managing Brockville’s finances.

To give you a brief version: The city is staring at a number of “risks,” or factors that may, or will, drive up costs in 2018.

Large commercial property owners have been winning big assessment appeals of late, something that seems likely to continue, sapping the city’s revenue, while arbitration talks with firefighters, expected in the fall, could further deplete the treasury.

Meanwhile, the Wynne government is proceeding with labour reforms, not the least of them a steep minimum wage hike.

And that’s not even counting the $4.7 million the city has committed to paying Brockville General Hospital for its major expansion.

Just when we thought we were getting that rock to the top of the hill, it is sliding back down on us.

It was ever thus.

“There’s no one in this room sitting comfortably in their chairs after that presentation,” said Earle, who warned the 2018 budget process is “not business as usual.”

Baker, however, told councillors he has heard all of this before.

The top finance official, at the start of a budget process, is pretty much required to point out all the things that could go horribly wrong, said Baker.

“This is the treasurer’s job,” he said.

Were it not for all the aforementioned, he added, Dick would have probably made reference to the infrastructure gap or some other looming challenge.

“If the sky is falling, it’s operating budget time,” Baker quipped.

Things are bad now, but they’re not as bad as they were back when Sanmina-SCI closed down, or when the province downloaded a host of services, and their attendant costs, to municipalities, said Baker.

Those of us who’ve been around the block, he added, know that this gloom and doom is the same every year.

This was reassuring, but only to a point.

Earle, too, was going around the same block for all those major economic events, and he sees a much more worrisome picture today.

Having been around that block for most of those times myself, taking notes at the media table, I am inclined to suggest a middle ground by proclaiming that, while the sky is indeed not falling, there really is no longer such a thing as “business as usual.”

Baker is mostly right: Staff does come back with some sort of gloomy scenario at the start of every budget season.

It’s just that the depth of that gloom has varied from year to year, and this year’s is among the darker forecasts.

The sky is not falling, but it’s getting darker right around the time the city has to start reckoning with the closure of Procter&Gamble and the cost of the hospital expansion.

Earle pointed out that, while the city did recover from the more serious economic blows of the two previous decades, those recoveries produced smaller industrial employers and fewer jobs.

“We traded dollars for quarters,” said Earle.

What we’ve been experiencing is not so much a recovery as a transformation, the contraction of our industrial base and the rise in importance of the tourism, retail and industrial sectors, each of which face their own regular challenges.

Not only are we changing, but the world around us is as well, making it a constant challenge to evolve and find our place in it.

Regional economic development and efforts to create new development lands are among the ways we are trying to adapt and evolve.

So is, in council’s estimation, the decision to bump up the tax levy increase from two per cent to three.

These things are all departures, in some ways, from what has lately been business as usual.

And in the fall, we’ll find out what a three-per-cent levy increase will require of us in further departures from the usual.

As I’ve said before in this space, it won’t be Skyfall, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be difficult.

City hall reporter Ronald Zajac can be reached by email at RZajac@Postmedia.com.